in his Tedx talk, Ruben Meerman said he was overweight and so he simply ate less and exercised more, and voila, he lost weight. He noticed that most people do not know where the weight goes when you lose it. He said it was all about converting existing body fat to carbon dioxide and water and some heat energy. He uses some marginally relevant demonstrations with dry ice and liquid nitrogen to illustrate this. So you breathe away weight. I don’t know how this is supposed to help me lose weight, but it was interesting to think about scientifically.

My doctor told me I need to lose weight or else I’m going to have to start taking various medications. But I am not interested in fad diets or spending time weighing out portions. Even though Brian Wansink got in trouble because he didn’t know how to do statistics or something, some of the ideas behind Mindless Eating made sense to me. So I have been limiting myself to one bowl per meal. So far it seems to be helping, but we’ll see.

Quite the pi day. Einstein’s birthday. Stephen Hawking passed away. Is that coincidence or some ploy? If you have enough things happening, some of them will be weird. Sir John Sulston, the Nobel prize-winning pioneering genome scientist, also passed away recently. He happened to be the father of a fellow scientist in the Scientist in Residence program, whom I had unwittingly emailed about bug boxes while she was in England at the funeral. And I heard a former prof, ornithologist and evolutionary biologist and good guy, Jim Rising, also passed away. Sadly, every combination can be found in pi.